Her response was a glare that would’ve stripped his skin from his bones were he not the son of First General Avelina, and the brother of Euphenia, Zuri, Nala, and Charo. “I have told you,” she enunciated through gritted teeth, “my name is Sharine. I would be most pleased if you should deign to use it.”
Perhaps she was suffering from the trauma of the war. She was an ephemeral creature. Having so much devastation on her doorstep had no doubt caused damage that was emerging as this strange, antagonistic behavior.
“Sharine,” he said with his most charming smile.
Her response was a baring of teeth that had him glad he wasn’t within arm’s reach. “What did Raphael tell you?” she snapped.
Affronted, he swept away from her for long wingbeats. Until he’d calmed down enough to return to fly at her side and just ahead enough to ease her journey. She didn’t look the least bit abashed at having driven him away.
Instead, she raised an eyebrow when he looked at her, and said, “Feeling better?”
Titus’s chest rumbled. If she were not the Hummingbird . . . “According to the Legion, there was another great war in our history.”
The information had come as no surprise to Titus. A race of immortals, many of them powerful, could not always live in peace. “During that war, an archangel released a poison that infected all of angelkind. Our people went to Sleep for an eon in the hope that our immortal bodies would find an answer to the poison while we Slept, but the poison was still part of our flesh when we woke.”
The horror of the story would’ve made Titus disbelieve it were he not living through Charisemnon’s plague. “In the interim, a whole new people were born—the mortals. According to the Legion, angelkind somehow discovered that by purging our poison into mortals, we could retain our health and sanity.”
“You’re speaking of the birth of vampires?” the Hummingbird said. No, not the Hummingbird. The Hummingbird was a creature gentle and vague and sweet. This was Sharine. Sharp-tongued, clear-eyed, and armed with a gaze like acid.
He shouldn’t be so fascinated with her. It was probably bad for his health.
“Yes, that’s what the Legion intimated.” The toxin that built up in angelic bodies over time, initiating a slow descent into horrific murderous madness, was his race’s greatest secret. It was their one weakness and it made mortals far more important to angelkind than mortals could ever know.
“I’ll ask Raphael more about this.”
“Do you think I lie to you?” he roared, his wings aglow with power.
16
She actually rolled her eyes at him. Rolled her eyes at the Archangel of Africa. “No,” she said. “I’d simply like to make sure we have all the details, so we can see if there’s something to be learned from it.”
Titus went to grumble back a response, when a herd of buffalo below caught his eye. The large and aggressive creatures with dark coats were moving in erratic ways, slamming their heads against each other and pawing at the earth. More than one set of wickedly thick horns glinted red with blood.
He flew lower. “Don’t get close enough for them to make contact!” he yelled back to the Hummingbird; he didn’t believe the creatures were in any way sentient, but there was a feral energy to them.
Hovering a few feet above, out of reach of their lunges, he found himself looking down into reddened eyes and slavering mouths. That was when he saw torn-out throats, disemboweled stomachs, and missing limbs that caused some of the animals to drag themselves into the fight.
Cold infiltrated his bones. “They’re reborn,” he said to Sharine when she came to hover next to him.
Nothing and no one but the reborn had that particular vicious look in the eye—a kind of rapacious voraciousness that nothing could assuage. A hunger that was endless and even worse than the bloodlust that had taken hold in vampires across many territories. Titus’s theory on why Africa had been spared that scourge was that even the vampires were terrified of the reborn.
That, and any vampire who got out of fucking line was soon terminated by his fellows. No one sane wanted to foster or create a distraction from the battle taking place on the continent.
Sharine sucked in a breath. “I didn’t know it could be transmitted to animals.”
“Neither did I,” he said, his power alive in his hand. “No one else has reported anything of the like.” He had no proof as yet, but he knew this was Charisemnon’s doing; whatever poison he’d created, however he’d hybridized the reborn with his disease, it meant the horror could now jump between species.
“Sweet mercy.” Sharine’s lovely voice was as cold as his blood. “Lijuan and Charisemnon would’ve turned our entire world into a mockery of life.”
“I must end these buffalo, but I’ll need to take a sample back for my scholars and scientists.” He frowned. “I don’t have anything in which to preserve and carry a sample.”
“Create a hole in the earth,” Sharine suggested. “Dump some feed within. As long as the hole isn’t shallow, the creature won’t be able to clamber out.”
It was a smart idea. There was just one problem. “They’re no longer grazing on grass.” He pointed out the hunks of flesh that one buffalo had ripped out from the flank of another.
“Such horrors.” Sharine’s expression was open, her renowned kindness and heart at the forefront—yet there remained nothing fragile about her. “You’ll have to leave a dead animal in there with the reborn one, for your scientists need a live sample to study—if the infection melts the flesh of the reborn, you may otherwise end up with no sample at all.”
The reborn tended to be drawn to living flesh, but Titus wasn’t going to trap two maddened creatures together so one could eat the other. There were some lines he wouldn’t cross. “A living creature should survive if I create the hole under shade. I’ll send word back to my people as soon as I see a scout.”
Titus could speak mind-to-mind with his senior people from some distance away, but they’d flown beyond his maximum range. Mental speech had never been one of his stronger skills regardless, and was perhaps a reason he’d retained so much of his Cascade-born abilities. To even out the spread of power in the Cadre.
“Wait.” Sharine’s voice was breathy . . . flustered? “I’m foolish. We can use the phone—I have a number within it that connects to your court.”
“I don’t deal with such.” Titus examined the creatures below to see which he could most easily cut from the herd and corral.
“Careful, Titus,” she said, “lest you morph into a monument of yourself—one stuck in stone and in the past.”
As he watched her touch her fingers to the screen of the device, he chewed over her words, heat in his blood. He was who he was and he had no argument with himself.
Tito! Stop being so stubborn.
His eldest sister’s voice, an echo from childhood—or possibly from last year. Phenie still scolded him from time to time. She also went to great lengths to bring him his favorite fruit from the Refuge, and, when he’d been a child, had never begrudged the fledgling who tottered after her, eager to poke his nose into her business.
Come, Tito, we’ll go visit Master Carvari. It’s possible you have untapped musical abilities.
To Phenie’s great horror, Titus’s only interest in instruments was how to use them as weapons should he need to. Yet she’d never stopped him from being underfoot, not even when he spent an entire year with her while their mother led Alexander’s troops in battle.
Titus had long forgotten what that battle might’ve been or against whom, but he remembered sitting on the stone wall outside Phenie’s house, listening to her play the harp—and waiting in happy anticipation for when she’d inevitably call his name.